Archives for May 2017

The Brief, the Times of London’s daily legal news roundup, now has its own dedicated website.

Previously the Brief was distributed via a daily email bulletin, which will continue, but in addition articles will now be posted to the web space.

The respected news service has proved to be popular since its 2015 launch, but unlike most other daily legal news digests, it was hard for law firms and others to share content from The Brief since the articles and commentary only appeared in the email newsletters without any web links.

As well as launching the new website, The Brief has redesigned its content so that some articles are free to view, while others, labeled “premium”, are behind a paywall.

According to The Brief, the expanded content will include “comment from senior judges, politicians and others — as well as podcasts, events and coverage of law and the arts.”

MM: My name is Mike Manning and I am the senior product marketing manager at Neudesic for The Firm Directory, an experience management and social collaboration product for law firms and in-house counsel teams. We have roughly 20% of the AmLaw 100 and we are known within legal as the premier experience management solution.

Here at the LMA conference we are demonstrating how we can help law firms improve the process of responding to RFPs and pitch decks. So, if a law firm needs to know who are the individuals within the firm that have expertise in a given matter, client, location or bar admission, they can utilize The Firm Directory to locate the profiles of those lawyers, and export that knowledge into a pitch deck or an RFP response.

We have made a number of improvements around our integrations including identity providers and SharePoint, we’ve added natural language search capabilities, mobile enhancements, and other user experience improvements.

LP: Most people who read this would think of legal directories as an external product. You are an internal product. Can you explain how a marketing manager or a PR manager in a law firm would use your product? What would be the benefit to them?

MM: One of the things we learned very early on with marketing and business development folks is that they’re passionate about their attorney bios, so our product can serve as a tool to push to their attorney bios or pull from the bios. And that may be internally focused bios or the external ones.

The benefits of an internal directory is that often times what marketing people put out externally on bios doesn’t reflect the full extent of the lawyers’ expertise, which can be more revealing internally.

You also develop teams over time which come together around certain practices or legal products, or there may be someone who may otherwise be overlooked but they have specific experience – say they have worked with a particular client. So, our product helps to create linkages to knowledge that you may not otherwise know exists.

LP: Before I was freelance, I worked in-house in a couple of large law firms. And you would see emails flying around saying “does anyone know about the Mexican bankruptcy code?”, “does anyone speak Latvian?”, things like that. For a big firm that has offices in lots of places, would your system enable a lawyer within a firm to not have to send that email, to be able to find that lawyer who speaks Latvian or whatever?

MM: That’s correct. One benefit is that once you have found that person or that group of people with this attribute or knowledge, since our product is built on a social collaboration platform, you can create “knowledge communities” – focused on that specific area of knowledge. You can then pose questions, see previous answers, conduct polling, share files, all revolving around that particular area of knowledge.

LP: Finally, how can people reach you if they want to know more?

MM: They can visit our website, contact me directly (mike.manning@neudesic.com), and I would be happy to share more information.

Part of a series of interviews with movers and shakers in the legal media world, held at the Legal Marketing Association conference in Las Vegas in March 2017.

LP: Can you introduce yourselves?
II: My name is Igor Ilyinsky, and I am the founder of a company called Firmwise. We help small and midsized law firms with their web presence and try to get them to move the needle with their marketing.

LP: As well as your main web business, you became famous in our little world for setting up Igor’s Spam List, an open source list of all the dodgy awards out there, after you got sick of your clients getting ripped off. Can you tell me how the idea came about?
II: Sure, so it’s a crowdsourced list. We put it together because there were some days when we would get maybe a couple of dozen emails from clients saying “hey, is this a reputable award” or “have you heard of this”. Sometimes those days would be crippling for us. So rather than have to reply to 50 different emails saying “no, this is not valid” or “yes, this is legit”, we decided to assemble a list based on our intelligence, and put it into an online spreadsheet that’s available to everyone. It wasn’t done as a business effort, it’s not something we charge for, it’s just for the general benefit of the community at large. What we’re trying to do is streamline the process because these mass emails come out and hit a bunch of attorneys at once, and they have no way of knowing whether these things are valid. The marketing people, the administrators at these firms, have no way of knowing if they are valid, so we at least try to provide some collective intelligence that helps everyone make informed decisions.

LP: So tell me about your graded system – it’s not black or white, spam or no spam?
II: Generally speaking, we try to filter things into big buckets, but not ever spammy award is “pure spam” so we have a few different classifications. We want firms to understand that there could be some value for a firm in going forward with one of these awards if their business could benefit from it. But that’s a business decision they have to make. On the other hand, there are many that are pure spam, there’s no reputation behind the organization providing these awards, it’s purely a pay to pay scheme, and you get no value out of payment.

Igor Illyinsky, Firmwise

LP: The worse ones are the fake awards, where they’ve done no research, they’ve made it up?
II: Right, they’ve done no research, they have no audience, so you can pay them any amount of money but anything they distribute doesn’t get any traction or potential prospects. They’re just a complete waste of money. So, we mark them as pure spam. But then there some that are not pure spam and are reputable, and have a specific focus. Let’s say you’re a trial lawyer and your work in product liability and you know the manufacturing industry, this might be a viable award for you as that’s their audience, but in many cases, they fall somewhere in between.

LP: Do you have plans to develop the products? At the moment, it’s a basic piece of technology. Are you considering doing anything with it, or just leaving as it is?
II: Not really. The intent was always to keep it open and available to the entire community. We don’t own it, we manage it. Sometimes we get enquiries from organizations that want to improve their rank or reputation. We don’t control that, but I’ve been contacted by a few people who say that my organization is legitimate, and somebody posted that we’re not legitimate. We say to them that we need evidence, you have got to put us in touch with a couple of firms whose internal people can vouch for you and say they have had some value. Otherwise there’s no way for us to know.

LP: So you wouldn’t take down something marked as spam if the owner of that business protested?
II: No, we don’t just take it down, because we didn’t put it up in the first place. The beautiful thing about the list is that generally what happens is a bunch of people will get an email, normally it’s the marketing person that gets the email from the attorneys saying “I was nominated for this award. Should we go forward, buy the plaque, the ad placement”. Many of the marketing people will now look at the Spammy Awards List to see if it’s on there. Someone will put them on the list initially, but at least one of say 50 will have requested further information to the point where they have made a decision as to whether to purchase or not. That’s the valuable information – the additional insight behind the organizations. Not just “yes this is spam, no this is spam” but “for most people this will not be beneficial” or “you can go forward with a free program but they try to upsell you on a $1000 sponsorship”. There’s a catch somewhere. That’s what people want to know about and that’s what the list is intended to provide.

LP: How can people reach you?
II: Email (igor.ilyinsky@firmwise.net), or connect with me via LinkedIn

Part of a series of interviews with movers and shakers in the legal media world, held at the Legal Marketing Association conference in Las Vegas in March 2017.

LP: Can you introduce yourselves?
LHS/ED: I’m Lisa Hart Shepherd, CEO of Acritas, and I’m Elizabeth Duffy, the vice president of Acritas in the US. Acritas is a market research company specializing in the legal sector. We conduct market surveys of general counsel around the world, speaking to 2,500 each year as part of our Sharplegal program. We’ve been doing that for 10 years. And we also survey star lawyers within law firms around the world.

LP: For those that are not familiar, can you explain your “Sharplegal” survey – this is like your flagship survey?
LHS/ED: It’s an annual survey conducted by Acritas. We speak to 2500 GCs around the world every year in large companies, and we do it all by telephone in their local language. We ask them about different law firm brands to track law firm brand strength. We also ask about buyer behavior – understanding how GC’s find and use their law firms. And we also ask about legal spend so that we can track what the next 12 months will look like, what the opportunities will be. There’s also an element of client feedback, so we can understand the levels and drivers of satisfaction in different parts of the world.

LP: When you publish your survey, what factors influence brand strength? What would differentiate the number one firm from number 20?
LHS/ED: The components that go into the brand index are top-of-mind brand awareness. Without giving them a list, we ask them who is top of mind, and those firms that they are most likely to think of when a new matter arises. That correlates into winning new work. We also ask about favorability – which firms they favor the most. There have been some changes over time, so today for instance clients are more interested in international capability, they talk more about pricing, and value, and the commercial aspects, whereas 10 years ago, it was a lot more focused on expertise and speed of service. Size is a factor because the more lawyers a firm has, they’re touching more companies in the market, and that leads to stronger brand awareness. So, the larger you firm, the more likely you are to be near the top. But we’ve always found a correlation with marketing activity, so a firm that markets itself more actively can get a boost. The other factors that go into the Brand Index measure consideration levels for different work types and overall usage in the market.

LP: You’ve added an individual lawyer component to the survey recently? It’s not just about the firm.
LHS/ED: It came about because a few of our general counsel said, “you’re asking us about these firms, and we’re looking for a new firm in, say, Malaysia, and want an individual name”. So, we thought why not ask for individual lawyers that stand out and create a database to help our general counsel? They can see what their peers are saying and draw on this pool of thousands of recommendations from general counsel around the world rather than relying on people they know personally. So, we ask them which stars stood out and what was it that they liked – value, commerciality, expertise.

LP: You were saying there are quotes?
LHS/ED: Yes, you can see the verbatim quotes, and the type of company they came from. So, if you’re looking for a like for like peer recommendation from a similar sized company or within your industry sector.

LP: Is there anything new in the pipeline that legal marketers should be aware of?
LHS/ED: Yes, we’ve recently completed a survey of the star lawyers to find out what makes them tick, to find out what they think of the firms they work for. Most importantly, what do they believe firms can do to drive more star lawyer qualities? We’ve also started asking general counsel about what innovation they’re seeing in the market, and we’re going to start an innovation track service. That’s both from the alternative provider side (the alternatives to law firms as well as traditional law firms) and within their own department. And we’re offering more internal engagement surveys to law firms because we see such a strong correlation between employee engagement and a great client experience, so we are helping firms to measure that and identify the issues they might have.

LP: What’s the best way to get in touch?
LHS/ED: Give us a call. We have people in New York and London. Online at acritas.com.